issionaries and of a French garrison had done little to
civilise the natives.

Some years later, in 1881 and 1882, a French naval doctor, Clavel by
name, passed six months in the Marquesas. During his stay he made
personal observations and collected information on the natives. These he
subsequently published in a little work, which contains much of
value;[166] but when he wrote almost all the natives had been nominally
converted to Christianity and their ancient religion was practically
extinct.[167]

[166] _Les Marquisiens_, par M. le Docteur Clavel (Paris, 1885).

[167] Clavel, _op. cit._ pp. 68-71.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the German traveller Arthur
Baessler paid a short visit to the Marquesas. In his book of travel in
the South Sea he has given us descriptions of the islands and the people
as he saw them, including some account of the scanty remains of their
stone monuments and images.[168]

[168] Arthur Baessler, _Neue Suedsee-Bilder_ (Berlin, 1900), pp.
189-242. The writer omits to mention the date of his visit to
the islands, and the length of his stay in them.

CHAPTER VII

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY AMONG THE HAWAIIANS

Sec. 1. _The Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands_

The Sandwich or Hawaiian Islands form an archipelago lying in the North
Pacific Ocean just within the northern tropic. They stretch in a
direction from north-west to south-east for more than four hundred miles
and include eight inhabited islands, of which the most important are
Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai. Of these Hawaii is by far the largest;
indeed it is the largest island in Polynesia with the exception of New
Zealand. The islands are all mountainous and of volcanic formation. In
Hawaii two of the mountains are between 13,000 and 14,000 feet in
height, and two of them are active volcanoes; one of them, named
Kilauea, possesses the greatest active crater in the world, a huge
cauldron of seething lava, which presents a spectacle of awe-inspiring
grandeur when seen on a moonless night. The other and much loftier
volcano, Mauna Loa, was the scene of a terrific eruption in 1877 and of
another in 1881. Craters, large and small, hot springs, and other
evidences of volcanic activity, abound throughout the archipelago. One
of the craters on the island of Maui is said to be no less than fifteen
miles in circumference and about two thousand feet deep. The islands
appear to have been known to the